THE MOVING CASTLE

The castle is a heap of scrap metal, of pieces, of remains. A clunker or a junk dealer’s shop rigged up in a jumble. The shaping of things that have been hoarded for a lifetime by a compulsive hoarder. Old stuff, things thrown away, taken from a dump, and assembled somewhat randomly out of a childish whim.
Its shape resembles an armour, a shell, protecting the soft, vulnerable parts. Actually, out there in the world, war is raging.
It does not really look like a fairytale castle. It is more like a made-up and somehow monstrous animal. A round, iron body with four thin legs. Four chicken legs. So, it is unstable, heavy, and sustained by strong but slender struts. It looks as if about to crumble at any moment, as if it is made up of pieces and ready to break up into pieces.

When it first appears, the castle is seen from afar, from a window of a townhouse. Only smoke and a moving heap can be seen. When it is sighted, it arouses astonishment, wonder, and excitement. Howl, its owner, is both loved and feared.
They say he would eat your heart.

But it is not clear what we are talking about until we step inside.
From the inside, if we turn a dial over different colours, the magic door connecting the castle to the world will open onto different cities and different scenarios. Howl has a different identity, name, and nature in each one of them. He picks up the scenarios from the world and makes them up. He is a wizard. They are potentially infinite. They move through space and time.
And the extraordinary thing you realise as the story unfolds is the mechanism which moves this heap of scrap metal through space, both the linear space we see from the outside, and the multiple, kaleidoscopic, parallel, and temporal space that can be reached from the inside.

Yes, of course, there is magic!  But the concrete system of its wandering is in line with the early 20th-century industrial vision of imperial buildings, of cities with trams, of skies full of fighter planes and zeppelins, and of harbours with big ships from the outside world.
This four-legged iron fowl has a boiler.
And this boiler is Calcifer, the demon who lives in the hearth, and somehow has to play the part of the fire. Calcifer is the one who makes the castle move like a locomotive and at the same time, at Howl’s request, sends hot water into the bath.
If the demon – as happens towards the end of the story – were to leave the castle, the structure would collapse. If the demon were to die, the castle would fall apart. So when Calcifer weakens and turns all blue, close to cooling down completely and dying, the castle crashes down, it turns into nothing more than some kind of raft, precariously balanced on the four unstoppable chicken legs, which incredibly still hold out, still move forward, albeit tentatively, until the very last moment.

Now read it over and change the word theatre to the word castle. And instead of Calcifer and demon place the word research.

Roberta Nicolai